Taken Enemy (Diamond Ring Trilogy #1)

Chapter 1

COLE

One good thing about being raised by a heartless, conniving con artist of a mother: You recognize a sting before the trap is sprung. Thank you, Shannon Wolf.

The email I’m staring at seems legitimate. It claims to be from a genuine European Union agency. The message is filled with enough legalese to satisfy actual bureaucrats and to confuse everyone else. It’s signed by Carlo Lorenzi, who sent the message from a government building in Monaco.

The pitch is made perfect by its urgency—Lorenzi claims he’s been trying to reach my client for three months.

This is the last chance for Banque Wagner Privée—one of the largest banks in Switzerland—to complete its “outstanding government filings.” All transactions will be frozen if my client doesn’t submit its paperwork by close of business today.

There’s only one problem: This is a classic Bait and Switch.

The link in the email leads to an extremely malicious virus. One click, and a user will think he’s creating a proper account—setting a username and designating a password. But in the background, tendrils of code will twine around his entire computer system, hooking in and holding fast as bindweed.

If, that is, bindweed reports back to some underground hacker hundreds of times a minute, transmitting bank account information and confidential passwords, erasing itself after each information packet soars across the internet.

“I click on this now?” Hans Wagner asks for the third time in as many minutes.

“Wait,” I say into my headset, my fingers skating across my keyboard.

“The bank closes in two minutes,” Wagner says, nerves thickening his Swiss German accent.

“Wait,” I say, glancing at the clock counting down in the corner of my nearest monitor. I tap a final command into my intercept, the program I’ve installed to block the theft of Banque Wagner’s data.

“Mr. Wolf—”

I was Cole when we started this phone call—a hard-won concession from someone as straitlaced as a Swiss banker. “Wait,” I say one last time.

The intercept sends a ping, confirming that it’s rooted into Banque Wagner’s system.

“Mr.—”

“Now.”

Wagner gasps as he clicks on the hacker’s message. I watch from inside the bank’s system as the attacker’s program fires.

The enemy’s approach is gorgeous—clear, elegant code that gets in, wreaks destruction, and gets out. There’s nothing extra, nothing to slow down the rampage, just pure, unadulterated menace.

I’d be proud to put my name to it.

Instead, I’m left wondering who the fuck the Red Cap Raiders are. They signed their work deep inside their package with a single symbol: A Robin Hood hat with a feather set at a jaunty angle, the whole thing sketched in a jumble of ones and zeroes.

“Mr. Wolf…” Wagner sounds like he’s strangling. “Is it… Did it… Are we safe?”

With each incomplete question, the Red Cap code tries to report back to its creator. My program successfully throttles the competition: Threat contained. Threat contained. Threat contained.

“Completely,” I say, which unleashes a stream of German that I might understand if I hadn’t missed the last two years of Frau Schmidt’s class in high school.

I tap a few more keys and my intercept sends a message to Red Cap: “Back to coding school for you.” I sign the taunt Lone Wolf Enterprises.

The real work is done then, but it takes another hour to talk Wagner off the ledge of his top-floor Zurich office.

I send him the status report he demands, even though we both know his IT department doesn’t have the skill to explain it to him.

I wait patiently—or, at least, silently—while he feeds half a dozen dummy transactions through his newly protected system.

Once he’s finally satisfied that Banque Wagner is safe, I send him the number for one of my accounts in the Caymans. He transfers my substantial fee without argument, adding a ten percent tip.

This is the third Red Cap intervention I’ve made in the past year.

They’re getting more aggressive. This one would have succeeded if I hadn’t invested years in teaching clients like Wagner how to spot a threat.

Most people click on the email first, then hire me to do clean-up.

That takes a lot longer and adds at least three zeroes to the bill.

And some of Red Cap’s destruction simply can’t be cleaned.

I take off my headset and rub my hands over my face. Once again, I’ve pulled an all-nighter. I stretch my neck, first to the left, then to the right, before I tap the screen on my phone.

“Mr. Wolf.” Lars Nilsson answers before I hear a ring on my end.

“Phone the airport, please. Let my pilot know I’ll be forty-five minutes late.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And have the Jaguar waiting; I’ll take it to the plane.”

“Yes, sir.”

“My overnight bag—”

“Is waiting downstairs, sir.”

“My tux—”

“In a garment bag, sir. Downstairs as well.”

“And the Picasso—”

“Is boxed, wrapped, and waiting downstairs. Sir.”

Nilsson is as warm as winter in Uppsala, but he keeps my life running smoothly.

He’s resolutely blind to everything that happens in this house—both the legal activities and the illegal ones.

He renews his non-disclosure agreements every year on the anniversary of his employment.

I pay him like he’s the Chief Operating Officer of a Fortune 500 company which, in effect, he is.

I allow myself an extra three minutes in the shower, spending the time with my head down, my arms braced against the marble wall and my back pummeled by water hot enough to brew coffee. I turn the flow to ice-cold before I step out, more awake than if I’d managed my usual four hours of sleep.

When I return to the bedroom, Nilsson has been at work. My regular breakfast waits on the nightstand in a stainless-steel tumbler. I know the Greek yogurt has been boosted with flaxseeds, protein powder, and collagen, all blended into almond milk. Kale turns it bright green.

When Nilsson first started working for me, he laid out my clothes, but it only took him a week to realize that was a waste of time.

My closet is filled with identical outfits—bespoke-tailored black pants in winter-weight wool, summer-weight wool, and linen; black jeans; black cashmere turtlenecks; black silk T-shirts; and black cotton dress shirts for the few times I absolutely can’t escape wearing a tie. I own three tuxes.

Nilsson’s waiting at the front door with my laptop.

The computer is a custom-designed ruggedized machine, capable of operating anywhere from the North Pole to the equator, in the eye wall of a hurricane or the heart of a Saharan haboob.

It weighs seven pounds, but there are some things a smartphone just can’t do.

“Safe travels, sir,” Nilsson says as he holds my wool overcoat.

“I’ll be back by noon tomorrow,” I say.

“Of course, sir.” He’d say the same if I told him I was leaving for a five-year safari. Or if I said I’d be returning at six tonight with an army platoon and a marching band.

Nilsson has already stowed my belongings in the trunk—overnight bag, garment bag, and gift-wrapped priceless Picasso all neatly laid out so I can see he hasn’t forgotten a thing. I add the laptop, then climb behind the wheel.

The Jaguar purrs to life, and I glide up to my iron security gate. Without conscious thought, I glance at the mirror mounted on the right post, confirming no one is lurking on the brick sidewalk. With that coast clear, I check the left mirror.

Fuck.

She’s sitting on the sidewalk, cross-legged, her back braced against the steel-reinforced post of the gate.

Her hair is longer than the last time I saw her, past her shoulders, dyed a bright peacock blue.

She’s wearing blue jeans that look like they haven’t seen a washing machine in a year.

Her sweatshirt—Georgetown Basketball—is two sizes too big for her.

A bruise purples her right cheekbone.

I kill the car and walk over to the gate.

“Nutmeg,” I say.

“Hey, Cocoa Puff.” She’s the only person in the world who calls me that.

I cut her off, because I know what she’s about to ask. “You can’t stay here.”

She purses her lips in a practiced pout but winces when her cheek stretches beneath the bruise. “I only need a night.”

I shake my head. “Sorry.”

“I’ll sleep in the garage.”

“Nope.”

“Your Norwegian Elkhound can stand guard outside my bedroom.”

“Nilsson is Swedish. And no.”

She bites down on the tip of her tongue, just a tiny pink sliver glinting between her lips, and that’s the thing that breaks me.

Because Megan Artemis Wolf is my sister.

And because—despite all the years of running the cons Shannon taught us before we could read—Nutmeg has a tell.

She’s biting her tongue to keep from crying.

I still won’t let her past the gate. There’s no guessing who’s trailing after her—angry boyfriends or mafia assassins or federal agents looking to throw her in jail. Nutmeg is a one-woman tsunami of chaos, and I’ve learned my lesson too many times to count.

If I let her into the house, she’ll set up a Big Store scam, running an elite casino out of the living room, just like that old movie The Sting.

Or she’ll salt a dozen cheap-ass paintings between my Monets and Renoirs and Matisses, selling her rip-offs to gullible marks.

Or she’ll run the Realty Ruse, “selling” my home with the help of an imaginary mortgage broker and law firm, maybe to two or three people at once.

She’s done it all before.

But she’s my sister. And her sweatshirt is no match for DC’s late winter weather. That bruise is real; I’ve seen enough fake ones to know. I can’t leave her sitting on the sidewalk.

I glance at my Patek Philippe. I don’t really need to know the time—I own the plane I’m heading toward, and my pilot will wait no matter how late I arrive. I’m stalling. Making up my mind.

“Okay, Nut,” I finally say. “I’ll get you a room for the night.”